In the Rogue Blood Read Online Free

ire by asking Maggie for a turn on the floor more than once of a Saturday night. Then came the night Rainey asked Lilith to dance and Daddyjack put a knife in his chest. Then came Florida.

6
    They made their homestead in the deep timber, well off the main trace, on Cowdevil Creek near its junction with the Perdido River. The shadowing forest towered around them. They cleared a tract and built a two-room cabin and a stable. Lilith and Maggie planted a vegetable garden in a clearing that caught sun for part of every day. The mosquitoes were unremitting and the summer humidity made warm gel of the air and alligators ate the dogs in the first few weeks. Yet game was plentiful andthey never lacked for fresh venison or wild pig and the creek was thick with catfish and bream and snapping turtle. They often spotted black bear lurking at the edge of the surrounding woods and they sometimes heard a panther shriek close by in the night. Huge owls on the hunt swooped past the house in the late evenings with a rush of wings like maladict spirits. They kept the stable and the henhouse bolted tight after dark. They hewed timber and trimmed it and sledded it to the creek and rafted it to the river where a logging contractor showed up on a steamboat every six weeks or so to buy it and float it downriver to sell to the lumber companies.
    “It’s a good place we got here, boys,” Daddyjack said one evening when they all sat on the porch steps at sunset and he was mellow in his cups. Maggie sat in a chair with her feet up on the porch railing. “Ever man needs a place to call his own,” Daddyjack said. “You boys remember that. Without a place to call his own a man aint but a feather on the wind.”
    But his drinking had now become dipsomaniac and his demons more frequently slipped their chains. In his sporadic besotted rages over the next three years he would accuse their mother of having coupled with that Rainey fool like a common yardcat, with him among others, from the time she was hardly more than a child. “The whole county probly knew about it, by damn! All these years they were
laughin
at me, laughin at Jack Little, the fool who married the whore! Probly
still
laughin!”
    She endured his bitter tirades with a stonefaced silence that only stoked his fury, and, if he was drunk enough, he’d strike her. At such times John felt pulled between allegiance to Daddyjack and an impulse to protect their mother. But he could never bring himself to intervene. His sister would look at him with such accusation he felt cowardly. Edward warned him not to mix in their parents’ scraps and not to pay heed to Maggie, who was likely to be crazy as their mother.
    “Crazy’s got nothin to do with it,” John argued. “She’s our mother, dammit! He ought not to hit her!”
    “And she’s his
wife
,” Edward said. “It aint for us to push into it.”
    At times now Daddyjack denounced their mother for her girlhood whoring even when he was fully sober. The hate that passed between his parents had become so rank Edward believed he could smell it like rotted fruit.
    And yet they still mated. Not as often as before but more ferociously than ever, snarling like dogs over a bone, like they were set on drawingblood from each other. Edward knew John and Maggie heard them too, though they never spoke of it. His sister had lately become moody and increasingly reticent with her brothers and was even more closemouthed than usual following a night of their parents’ loud coupling. Her brooding troubled John but Edward simply shrugged at it, remembering Daddyjack’s admonition: “Like mother, like daughter.”
    One early morning they woke to find Maggie gone. She’d slipped out in the night and saddled Daddyjack’s horse and made off as quiet as a secret thought. Daddyjack admired her nerve even though she’d taken his horse. “Wasn’t the least bit of moon out last night,” he said. “And I heard a painter yowlin in the south wood just before I